This week for our group has been a quieter one indoors, and a very busy one out in the backyard. Our hyacinths are blooming, thick blue spikes of color in our pots of pansies. Our peas are beginning to sprout too; we can just barely see the green bits emerging from the soil. On Tuesday, both V and T helped me crush washed eggshells with a mortar and pestle, and then scattered the pieces over the sprouts. This will give the peas some protection against slugs and cutworms.
Now that the we have the trellis for the peas to grow on, chasing games are a big hit. Having a longer shape to run around (the children's house and the peas) is making these games more challenging. What else is happening outside? We're noticing the different colors and variety of daffodils. B has been 'making food' over by the rain garden with rocks, pine cones and sweet gum pods. Yesterday, she gave me a "breakfast" of two rocks! Our new rainbow wind spinner tells us the direction of the wind, and the children are noticing this and calling out, pointing "The wind is blowing from that way!" Our "Hide the Shoe" game is starting to involve clues and hot/cold directions from the children. After a story time book on composting and compost piles, we turned over the compost to find impressive masses of very healthy-looking worms, which astonished the children. I think V wanted to hold each of them in turn; she loves to examine the worms and bugs. On Wednesday, after a shorter Trail Walk, we dug out "a lake and a channel" for water in the sandbox, and unearthed some long-buried treasures as well, then brought buckets of water over to fill up our waterways. We've also decided as a group that it was time for the 'nest' of old grapevine trimmings to go, so that we can make a permanent site for fairy house play.
Family, food, and growing things have been topics of conversations and story time this week. On Tuesday, we finished working on a group collage of "Foods We Like" and our individual pages for our books. Thursday also found us working on book pages, this time pasting pictures of our family onto the paper and naming the members of our family. There have been a Prince and Princess keeping busy in the housekeeping this week; V and B have made many Stone Soups as they play these characters. One of their conversations when this all started:
B: You're going to be the princess and I'm going to be the guy.
V: Who? The guard or the guy?
B: The guy.
V: Oh, the prince.
They've been switching off playing these roles, with lots of dress-up play. T has been enjoying these moments for himself, building with magnet blocks, and bristle blocks. On Wednesday, he made a bristle block camera and took pictures of V.
Our block area has been busy. B and V loaded trains and trucks with nuts and stones and ran them round the 'track' of the carpet. T joined them, bringing the house puzzle down and stating "I think we need a station." Wednesday found a colorful skateboard park of both the smaller colored blocks and long unit blocks, created by T and V, who are obviously working toward creating the best skate park ever! Their cars were the 'skateboards', which did tremendous tricks and flips. Very daring!
We are moving into a time of working with eye-droppers, and will have more art opportunities for this as the weather warms up and we can move the big paper easel outside. This is a challenge of both fine motor skill and learning a sequence of actions, which we sang: "Squeeze, Let Go, Pull it Out, Squeeze Again". Sounds a bit silly from an adult perspective, but keeping these steps in order is essential to actually getting the watercolor paint from bottle to paper. It's always neat to observe each child's techniques. B used her dropper to draw out the color from the bottle, then made lines of paint with the tip of the dropper, using it almost like a pencil to move the color. T has been talking a lot lately about the story of "Little Blue and Little Yellow", and had fun dropping yellow paint onto blue dots he'd first put onto the paper, watching at how they turned green. V dripped different colors onto each other. "Look, I'm making a river!" exclaimed T, noticing the color becoming a stream of sorts. "Look at my river right here!" invited V. The children worked on trays, so they could tip and manipulate the paint once it had been dropped on. And we discovered that all those colors together (red, blue, green) make some interesting browns.
A few more moments from our week:
T and V using reinforcement ring stickers and markers on paper. T draws a 'giraffe-- there's the eye'. ( a reinforcement ring was used. V makes 'boats going around', a series of circles. "Like my 1?" asks T, drawing a numeral 'one' onto his paper. V writes her entire name on her picture, with a little help ( I drew out the letters she couldn't immediately recall onto a separate piece of paper). Quite a proud girl!
Play dough: lots of scissors play on Tuesday (cutting up food circulars), and play dough time was no exception. V asked B " can I do what you're doing?" and both cut away at the chunks of dough for a time. T makes 'a cake with a candle' and then builds a 'teeter-totter' with the dough. V creates a teeter-totter too.
V and T sort through the colored rice bin for beads and buttons. They are very interested in their discoveries.
We continue to explore puzzles. Our dinosaur puzzle is a huge hit, the mouse puzzle also a challenge. We are working on referring to the picture on the box for the latter; for the former, much of this is looking for clusters of color (the dinosaurs are very colorful) and textures and matching those up. When they're stumped, I'm asking them to look at the shapes of the pieces, to remind them about distinguishing between edge and center pieces. This will take a lot of practice before it becomes automatic.
We changed up our Animal Mothers and Their Babies matching game to include making the sounds each animal makes. Quite a cacophony of noises!
Have a great weekend, and I'll see you Tuesday!
